cw-land

Verified work still has to land without stepping on other writers, losing contributor credit, or merging past a gate that has not actually passed. This stage is about the boundary between "it works" and "it is in main" — and about which of those steps you are allowed to take.

Stage 5 of the loop: cw-orient → cw-slice → cw-gates → cw-dogfood → land → cw-handoff.

When to use

• The change is verified and needs to become a commit on main.
• You are landing someone else's PR, harvesting a contributor's work, or resolving a conflict caused by main moving.
• You are about to merge something behind a required gate.

Workflow

1. Land on the canonical checkout's main. AGENTS.md owns this: no maintainer PR branches, worktrees, nested clones or integration lanes. Several agents share the checkout, so partition by file, check git status before staging, stage only your paths (never git add -A), and retry a commit that fails on index.lock. Push verified main directly; hosted CI runs there. PRs are for contributors.

2. Commit narrow and build-green. One coherent change per commit; the tree builds at every commit. Put the real verification in the message — actual pass/fail counts, not "tests pass".

   Before every push, run the cheap drift checks that have turned a green main red most often. They take seconds:

   cargo fmt --all -- --check
   sh scripts/sync-changelog.sh --check        # after any CHANGELOG.md edit
   bash scripts/release/check-versions.sh
   python3 scripts/check-runtime-contract-budget.py
   

   Add the one that matches what you touched: check-tui-locale-parity.py and check-tui-product-vocabulary.sh (locale strings), check-dead-code-budget.py (#[allow(dead_code)]), check-blocking-calls-budget.py (async code), check-readme-translations.py and check-readme-locales.sh (READMEs), node web/scripts/derive-facts.mjs && node web/scripts/check-facts.mjs (public facts). Put a new CHANGELOG entry at the top of [Unreleased]. Open contributor PRs append at its end, and an entry of ours there conflicts with every one of them.

3. Preserve credit mechanically, not just politely. Commit authorship and Co-authored-by: trailers must use the contributor's own GitHub-linked address — GitHub reads neither .github/AUTHOR_MAP nor .mailmap for the contribution graph; those are project conventions on top. When a contributor's work lands as our commit, it carries both:

   Harvested from PR #N by @handle
   
   Co-authored-by: Name <github-linked-email>
   

   That trailer is what lets auto-close-harvested.yml close their PR with credit. Canonical human identities live in .github/AUTHOR_MAP.

   Whether a bot or agent also appears in a trailer no longer matters — the CI check that policed trailer identities was removed because it rejected ordinary agent commits. Give humans their credit; don't spend time scrubbing tool trailers.

4. Landing someone else's work: their time is more expensive than ours.

   • Never make a contributor rebase around our churn. If their PR conflicts only because main moved, a maintainer resolves it.
   • Read their diff against the merge base first, so you know exactly what they added, then re-apply that — rather than hand-merging two large sides and hoping:

     git diff $(git merge-base main <pr-head>)..<pr-head>
     

   • Conflicts that split mid-function do not resolve by keeping both sides. Git's markers can land inside a body, so a both-sides resolution produces unbalanced braces that look plausible and do not compile. Default: take one side whole, then re-insert the other side's additions at their original anchor; when the conflict doesn't fit that pattern, resolve it however is correct and let the compiler judge.
   • Resolve on their branch without creating a local branch. Build the merge commit with git merge-tree --write-tree origin/main <pr-head> and git commit-tree <tree> -p <pr-head> -p origin/main, then push it with git push <fork-url> "${sha}:refs/heads/<their-branch>". In zsh, write ${sha}, not $sha:refs, because :r is a history modifier. maintainerCanModify does not guarantee that the push is accepted. When the fork refuses it, ask on the PR. Harvesting is the last resort.
   • Check the contribution gate before assuming a PR is stalled. An unlisted author's workflow runs sit at action_required and never start, so the PR looks abandoned when nobody has actually looked at it. Approve the runs, then fix the cause: add them to .github/APPROVED_CONTRIBUTORS (all:username), or comment /lgtm (PR scope) or /lgtmi (issue scope).

5. Verify mergeability against the real head. A PR that is clean against main can still conflict with a release branch:

   git merge-tree $(git merge-base <base> <pr-head>) <base> <pr-head>
   

6. Merging under a gate. AGENTS.md ("Merging under a gate") owns this: the artifact must literally say PASS, the review thread outranks the check rollup, and ambiguity blocks the merge — never the reverse. Before you merge, list the open PRs whose base is the PR's source branch (gh pr list --base <branch>) and retarget them first. Otherwise they close when that branch goes away.

Red flags / don't

• Don't tag, create a release, publish, or deploy without explicit authorization. Pushing verified main is allowed; it is none of those.
• Don't rewrite published history, retag a release, or force-push a shared ref.
• Don't commit AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md operator controls that live outside the product repository into a public repo.
• Don't stage another writer's dirty files to get a clean commit.
• Don't merge on a green rollup alone when a review thread has open findings.
• Don't harvest or close from a PR title or label — review the code, tests, comments, and checks.
• Don't add another legacy call site for convenience once a replacement architecture is adopted. Declared migrations are one-way.
• Don't leave new enforcement live: keep it dry-run/advisory unless approved.

Output

• Commit SHAs, the paths committed, the drift checks run, and the resulting origin/main SHA.
• The credit trailers applied and to whom.
• The gate artifact's literal verdict at merge time, if a gate applies.
• Exactly which public actions you took, and which you deliberately did not.